


Missing Persons

by Innwich



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: Abduction, M/M, Missing Persons, Pre-Canon, Rain, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 17:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3455753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innwich/pseuds/Innwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian was missing, and Joseph was searching Krimson City for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Persons

It was raining hard outside the precinct.

Kidman had clocked out an hour ago, right on the dot, before it’d started pouring. Maybe she’d had the right idea after all.

One of the janitors was starting up a vacuum cleaner in the break room. The lights were turned down for the night. Most of the department had gone, even though Joseph knew for a fact that they had half a dozen of cases open. But the living needed to sleep, and the dead weren’t going anywhere.

Alone at his desk, Joseph opened his notebook to where he’d kept a photo of Sebastian and a tally. With a heavy heart, he added a new entry in his journal:

       
_Day 5:_   


       
_It is raining heavily. Any remaining tracks are likely to have been washed away. There is no progress in the investigation._   


       
_I think Kidman knows about my unauthorized investigation. It’s in the way she looks at me whenever Sebastian’s name is brought up in a conversation. Or am I being paranoid?_   


 

A dozen of addresses were listed on the next page. He’d already put down a tick next to each of them.

Joseph had been to Sebastian’s apartment and questioned his landlord and his neighbors. He’d shown them the picture of Sebastian to help jog their memories, but apparently Sebastian hadn’t been home much.

He’d visited the ex-cons that had once been caught by himself and Sebastian. Men and women that could be holding old grudges against Sebastian. Joseph had stood outside their house and let them see him. Let them knew he had his eyes on them

No one could disappear without a trace. There was always something left behind.

At least that was what Joseph told himself.

In some dark crevices of his mind, where his thoughts sometimes strayed, Joseph could see Sebastian lying on the ground with his brains sprayed on the wall behind him. It would be Joseph’s fault, because Sebastian had nothing left after what had happened to Lily and Myra, and Joseph had given him the last nudge over the edge by betraying his trust.

Joseph could hear it in the silence whenever the other detectives walked past his desk. No one asked him to the bar after work anymore. They all knew it was he who reported Sebastian to Internal Affairs. If they found Sebastian lying dead in a ditch somewhere, they would all agree it might as well be Joseph who put him there.

Cops hated snitches, and Joseph despised himself.

“Oda.”

Joseph started badly. He closed his notebook with a little more force than necessary, and turned around to find the Chief standing behind him. “Yes?”

“Can I have a word with you?” the Chief said.

“Did Kidman say something to you?”

“Was there something for her to tell me?” the Chief said.

“No, of course not,” Joseph said.

He was seeing traitors and backstabbers lurking around every corner. Perhaps that said more about him than it did about anything else.

The Chief gave him a stony stare. It was well-known that the man had been a decorated detective back in the days, and he never failed to make Joseph feel like he was sitting on the wrong side of an interrogation room.

“You better head home, detective,” the Chief said. “The weather will get worse. You don’t want to get caught in the storm.”

\- - -

Joseph took the train home.

His apartment wasn’t that far away from the train station, but it was cold and dark and wet, and he didn’t bring an umbrella with him. It was going to be a long miserable walk in the rain.

Joseph turned up his collar and hurried down a quiet street. Trees lined the street, so they gave him some shelter from the rain. His socks and pants were getting soaked. He had to go home and changed into dry clothes.

He would have to crank up the heater at home tonight, if he wanted to wear this coat against tomorrow.

A figure stepped out from behind a tree and blocked his way.

Joseph squinted through his glasses. It was hard to see with water drops on his lenses; he could barely make out the face underneath the umbrella.

“Kidman?” Joseph said. A faint alarm was going off in his head. There was something wrong about Kidman waiting for him on a street in a rainy night. But Joseph was cold and tired, and Kidman was his junior partner, so he stopped and said, “What are you doing here?”

“Sorry, but I have to do this,” Kidman said.

A wet cloth was slapped over Joseph’s mouth and nose. Before Joseph could pull out his gun, someone grabbed him from behind and pinned his arms to his sides. Joseph refused to breathe in the chloroform. He knocked his head backwards, trying to dislodge the man’s hand from his face. The man tightened his grip, locking Joseph in that steel cage of a body.

Joseph kicked at his shins, but the attempt was feeble.

Joseph was running low on air.

The muscles in his chest were fluttering. His lungs were burning up from the sheer effort of holding his breathing. It was getting difficult to override his instinct to survive, to get oxygen to his brain, to breathe.

Joseph opened his mouth involuntarily.

The last thing he saw was Kidman standing in the rain.

\- - -

It was raining hard.

Joseph sucked in a lungful of dry cold air.

He was sitting in the familiar backseat of a cruiser with his head leaning against the window. His glasses had slid down the bridge of his nose. He rubbed at his eyes and found grit on his glove.

Had he fallen asleep?

“He’s awake,” Kidman said.

Joseph looked over to find Kidman sitting on his left, leaving a respectable foot of space between them. An unexplainable sense of unease washed over Joseph. There was something off kilter about her that he couldn’t put into words. Something that made him want to shrink away from her.

Kidman returned his gaze steadily. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Joseph said, pushing up his glasses. Must have been the result of too many hours spent listening to Sebastian ranting about their partner.

Joseph felt his chest seized, like he’d missed a step on the stairs and his heart had leapt up to his throat. It was that feeling he got whenever he misplaced something important. His hand inched to his pocket instinctively.

No. His notebook was still there.

What was he forgetting?

“Did you have a late night, Joseph?”

Joseph stopped dead in his tracks. Slowly, He looked up into the rearview mirror, and saw Sebastian watching him with a bemused smile.

“Never thought I’d see you fall asleep on the job,” Sebastian said.

“You’re here,” Joseph said. He wasn’t sure why he said it. For some reason he’d thought there shouldn’t be anyone riding shotgun, which was, of course, ridiculous. Sebastian always liked riding shotgun because it was the closest he could get to driving the car himself.

“Where else would I be?” Sebastian said. “You feeling okay?”

“Yeah.”

It was like seeing an old friend again. That was exactly what Sebastian was: One of the oldest friends that Joseph had. It was what he felt whenever he arrived early in the morning at the precinct and found Sebastian looting through the piles on his desk for a case file. Joseph wasn’t sure why he’d been worried in the first place.

They were friends. Partners. Nothing would change that.

The bottles might not be going away any time soon, but Sebastian was here and alive and well, despite everything that had happened to him. Maybe Joseph had just needed that reassurance to make the world right again.

“You slept like a baby, detective,” Connelly said from behind the wheel. “We couldn’t bear to wake you up. What were you dreaming of?”

“Just a bad dream,” Joseph said, leaning back in his seat. “It doesn’t matter now.”

The radio crackled.


End file.
